No
dark clouds literally blew in during the financial storm. No flowers actually
bloomed during the Arab Spring. And when we save data to a cloud, our files
don’t really reside in a fluffy white mass of condensed water vapour.

We
use metaphor once every sixteen words. Using imagery to conceptualise abstract
thought is wholly natural and has led to some of the greatest intellectual
breakthroughs in history, from Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to James Watson’s
‘building blocks of DNA’. But what if this power was turned against humanity?
In Nazi Germany, Hitler depicted the Jews as vermin and 6 million people were
killed. MRI scans show the brain struggles to differentiate between the literal
and metaphoric, enabling the illegitimate to appear legitimate and good people
to turn evil.

Top
speechwriter Simon Lancaster goes on a mission to find out how metaphors are
being used and misused today. He finds that the same images reoccur,
repeatedly, around the world. Such imagery is ubiquitous, crucially shaping and
moulding the way we experience and view events.

This
book raises profound questions about the power of language and the language of
power.